After she died, I pawed through her things for what I could take to make me remember her, swiping tears off my cheeks all the while. The tears felt inauthentic somehow, but kept dripping anyway. My brother didn't want anything of our mother's, he said. 

 

Okay then, the challenge was everything had to squeeze into one suitcase, 3000 miles on a plane from Honolulu to LA, the rest on a cheaper bus to New York, back to where I live now. So, no to her size narrow Ferragamo shoes, my wide, graceless feet couldn't fit into them. No to her clothes dangling on some moving contraption in her walk-in closet, fur stoles looking like hung ferrets. Who wears fur in Hawai'i? 

 

With her small waist and pear-shaped hips, Betsy liked to dress "feminine", she called it, pink puffy sleeves, lace. I didn't aspire to be feminine. My hipless shape preferred boy's clothes, loose pants, oversized shirt and a denim or leather jacket, depending on the season; her jackets had sequins or embroidery. Her jewelry has a similar aesthetic, flashy, and always "real."

 

Having grown up poor, she was proud when my dad made some money, determined to prove she had "worth." I was into small, understated pieces you could wear on a Greyhound across the country, fall asleep, and when you got off the bus in New York, they were still on you. Silver and turquoise to her gold and diamonds.  

 

Still, I snagged her jade ring, supposed to bring good luck, or protection, something like that, and the gold-etched Hawaiian bracelet she seldom wore. She gave it to me when I was a teenager, then reclaimed it when these became "fashionable." I took things I never knew she owned, like opera glasses. Opera glasses? She told me she hated opera, that it was "your dad's thing." Her pink leather diary, she wrote her laments in, snubs from friends, marital ambivalence. Pink, her signature color. "You act like a boy," she sulked, on my twelfth birthday, when, after a surprise party with a pink ballerina birthday cake, I insisted she de-pink my bedroom. I shook my head. "I'm a girl," I said, "who hates pink." 

 

I took her perfumes. There was only one I might actually use, a raw, woodsy scent, like what I imagine fungi pheromones would smell like, but I liked spritzing her flowery ones into the air then breathing my mother in. I took a double Kukui nut lei someone gave her on her 50th birthday, supposed to be worth a lot of money. Breast cancer almost stole her from her 60th. I took her nail polish. She had beautiful long-fingered hands, and while I would never wear it on my own stubby fingers, their chewed-up nails, I liked to remember her playing the piano years ago, fingernails a resonate pink. She was a concert pianist, but quit after our dad made money, after she had kids, playing only at Christmas sing-alongs, "Jingle Bells," "Deck the Halls."

 

Did her husband's money or my brother and I ever give her what a lifetime career in piano might have, passion, purpose, her worth? 

 

Six thousand miles away, I couldn't make it in time. My father was the only one home when Betsy passed. Exhausted, he had fallen asleep on his bed in the bedroom next to hers; when he woke up hours later, her body was pale and cold. The doctor said she died of congestive heart failure, "a kind of slow suffocation, like drowning in the lungs," he told me, when I asked. 

 

Stroking her jade ring on the bus heading back home, I wanted to remember her before this drowning, before the breast cancer, before her clinical depressions, Valium abuse, her increasing dissatisfaction with my father, his money (never enough), my brother, me. One of my best memories was as a little girl, her reading to me from our favorite book, about selkies, seals who could shed their skins and walk the land as women, reclaim them and become seals again. She liked the Isle of Skye setting, "my Gaelic heritage," she claimed. I liked the idea of being a woman who could change skins. My brother didn't appreciate the story; already surly and distant at eleven, he'd stalk out of the living room whenever she began reading.

"Damaged goods," I heard her whisper to our dad, about their son. 

"Oh, Betsy," he sighed.

 

The bus passes through some industrial town in the middle of the country, middle of the night, lit up like fireworks, to disguise its dreary daytime reality perhaps? And I have a sudden need to revise my mother's passing, to not keep seeing her in my head, dying from congestive heart failure, all alone in that bed, her husband asleep on the other side of the wall that was between them. 

 

Betsy at the ocean shore, choppy little waves from high tide swirl around her ankles, hair that Scottish blaze of her youth, straps of her bathing suit pulled down, face tilted upward toward the sun almost like she's kissing it. She was always more of a sun-worshipper than a swimmer; still, with her sea-green eyes wide open, eyes the color of her jade ring, she plunges into the ocean, diving gracefully under a giant swell, rising like a phoenix on the other side, then under again, cavorting in the turquoise waves. Her woman flesh has metamorphosed into the slick skin of a seal, and she revels in her sleek new shape. Up she comes at the top of a swell, then down, down, down, to where the deep indigo ocean grows colder, to where there is colorful pink, green, and orange coral, with spiny, graceful sea urchins in between the waving polyps, and the starry-eye parrotfish, panuhunuhunu, swimming lazily around her. Instead of gasping for breath at the end of her life, Betsy doesn't need to breathe at all, and lets the ocean bear her.